MacBook Pro, Why Did it Have to be You?

Apart from work issued laptops I’ve never really owned my own personal portable computer. A couple years back I did purchase a $300 laptop off ebay in the hopes of transforming it into a carputer however the unfortunate happened and it gave up the ghost a couple weeks after I bought it. Since then I’ve shunned most laptops as I’ve never had a reason outside work to have one, but all that changed recently when several different cosmic forces conspired against me to push me towards my ultimate decision, the MacBook Pro.

Coming up at the end of the year I’m getting married (yay!) to my lovely fiance. We’re going on our honeymoon to location X (no one but me knows where it is, ha!) and if it’s one thing that I’ve learnt from my friends who’ve travelled the world is that pictures and memories will only take you so far. When the first of my group of friends jetsetted overseas he was presented with a travel journal to chronicle his trip. This was long before any of us considered blogging or similar as it was still really in its infancy back then. So I resided myself to get some kind of portable computer to take along with us, not for entertainment just to write in of a night time. Hence I decided that I needed something that was light and compact with a decent battery life. At this point in time I was looking pretty squarely at a netbook as they tick all the boxes and are cheap to boot. I was thrown a requirement curve ball not too long afterwards however.

Enter my budding web application Geon. After showing it around to everyone the consensus was that the end game I was aiming for would be shot in the foot if I didn’t target the iPhone. Since I can write off one phone a year as a business expense the prospect of buying an iPhone isn’t such a bad prospect for me (and really if I don’t want to use it my fiance will gladly take up the opportunity) so I’d resigned myself to getting one once I had matured Geon to a level where I felt iPhone uses would want it. Thinking that such a widely used device would have development environments available for all platforms I set off looking for one so I could have a play.

Oh how wrong I was.

Turns out the iPhone SDK is only available to those who have a Mac to develop on. There is talk of some people running it on Windows using some creative hacks however it doesn’t appear to be all roses for them and 99.999% of the resources I found online make no mention of anything else other than a Mac environment. The cheap option here would be to buy a second hand mac mini but since I’m in the market for a Mac of some description and a laptop it’s going to be better to get something that can cover both requirements.

So I’ve resigned myself to get a MacBook Pro and whilst I initially struggle with the idea of shelling out so much cash for a laptop I’ve come to appreciate what I’ll end up getting. For the same specifications the MacBook Pro is incredibly small and light. Couple that with the new battery which lauds 8 hours of life (I’d be happy with 4  when specs like it has are involved) and it’s a pretty decent machine. Plus thanks to Boot Camp I can happily hide MacOS away if I want to delude myself into thinking I bought a silver Dell or something for a while.

I’m even slightly tempted by the 128GB SSD upgrade option for $288. That’s not too bad with all things considered.

Now where did I put that turtleneck……